.NET 11 Is Coming. Here's What Web Developers Should Care About.

.NET 11 is currently in preview, with the final release expected in November 2026. And there's a mountain of new stuff, but most of it can wait until you've finished your coffee. Here are a few things web developers might actually care about.

JSON Gets More Useful

System.Text.Json gets another round of improvements, including better support for naming policies (say hello to JsonNamingPolicy.PascalCase), C# union types, and more flexible serialization APIs.

HTTP Gets Some Love

.NET 11 adds HTTP request-body compression, configurable HTTP connection eviction, typed DNS record resolution, and some HTTP/3 improvements. Nothing sexy enough for a conference keynote, perhaps, but the boring infrastructure stuff is usually the stuff you appreciate when your application has been running for six months.

Async Gets Faster

.NET 11 continues work on runtime-native async, with improvements aimed at reducing overhead, allocations, generated code size, and generally making async/await less expensive. Your Task isn't going to suddenly become a Formula 1 car, but the runtime team is definitely still tuning the engine.

C# 15 Is Along for the Ride

.NET 11 also brings C# 15, including things like collection expression arguments, union types, closed hierarchies, extension indexers, and memory-safety features. Which means you'll have new toys to play with while your coworkers wonder why the code suddenly looks like wizardry.

What About Feature Management?

Not much changes here. Feature management remains feature management. You still define features, evaluate flags, and use them to control application behavior without tying releases to deployments. If you're using Microsoft.FeatureManagement today, keep calm and code on.

One Small Catch: .NET 11 Isn't LTS (Long Term Support)

.NET 11 is an STS (Standard Term Support) release, not LTS. STS releases get two years of support, compared with three years for LTS releases. The bigger issue is that some cloud providers (looking at you AWS), enterprise environments, libraries, and third-party tooling only support LTS releases, so they'll skip this one. But, .NET 11 looks like a worthwhile upgrade for teams that can use the latest runtime, library, and language improvements. Read more at Microsoft.

Sometimes boring is a feature.